As many as half a million residents of the Chinese city where the coronavirus pandemic is said to have originated may have been infected with the virus, about 10 times the number of confirmed cases initially recorded.
According to A study Released Monday by China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention that surveyed more than 34,000 people in April, about 4.4 percent of people tested were found to carry the antibodies that fight the virus that causes COVID-19.
The presence of antibodies means that the people have ever had the virus, and given the ratio, nearly 500,000 Wuhan residents, with a total population of 11 million, could be infected.
This is nearly 10 times more than the 50,000 confirmed cases reported by Chinese health authorities in mid-April.
Last Sunday, Wuhan had reported a total of 50,354 confirmed cases of COVID-19, according to the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission.
This week’s investigation indicated that the contamination rate in Wuhan was significantly higher than in other Chinese cities. For example, the survey found that only 0.44 percent of Hubei residents surveyed had the antibodies with them.
According to CNNYanzhong Huang, a senior global health fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the initial underreporting in Wuhan can be attributed in part to the chaos of the first months of the pandemic, as well as not counting asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 .
Huang pointed out that under-reporting is not an exclusive problem for Wuhan, as testing options were limited and hospitals were overwhelmed by a sudden increase in patient numbers as little was known about the virus in the early months.
However, the Chinese government has also faced criticism and criticism for a suspected lack of transparency about the seriousness of the virus.
Monday a citizen journalist who reported from Wuhan at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in China was sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of “arguing and causing trouble,” several reports said.
The charge is regularly used by the Chinese government against human rights activists and other dissidents.
Zhang Zhan, 37, traveled to Wuhan in February filming hospitals, neighborhoods and more as the city shut down during the initial COVID-19 outbreak. In its report, the government was accused of failing to inform citizens about the reality of the pandemic.
Prosecutors accused Zhang of “publishing large amounts of fake information” and receiving interviews from international media in order to “deliberately fuel the Wuhan Covid-19 epidemic situation”, CNN reported.